Melissa Doman

And the trouble is that when leaders are so busy playing the part of

when they can't keep playing the part and they're trying to go behind the curtain to let everything out, the more they keep playing the part, the more narrow the curtain becomes and it doesn't hide what's going on behind there.

Because again, if we go back to the finite space with building pressure and building pressure, it's just not sustainable.

It will come out at some point, whether it's at work or outside of work,

When you don't want it to, in ways you don't want it to, towards people you don't want it to.

And it's extraordinarily stressful.

I did something like 20 to 25 qualitative interviews for the second book, similar to the first one.

And the masking that leaders have to do, they're absolutely exhausted.

And there have been some people who talk about when they...

Give you know these disclosures that if they wait until they are exploding it doesn't go very well and other people who try to do it in a healthy way you know if they're not used to it in the organization then that can become difficult as well but.

If there is an expectation that leaders are consistently supposed to suppress and hide how they feel, and then we wonder why they start acting out.

Now, struggling with mental health as a leader is not a valid excuse to verbally abuse people.

It's not.

It is their responsibility to be aware of and manage their mental health.

However, we also have to look at the culture we have set up around leadership behavior and how the forced silence that we put on leaders through those expectations has to logically, logically account for some of the maladaptive coping behaviors that they put towards their teams.

There's no way it's 0%.

We just can't say that.

So there's the responsibility on the leader of how they're sharing, but there's also the responsibility of a work environment to make them feel like they can.

I wrote about that actually, I think in the preface.

I remember in 2018, I was living in London with my husband and I was on a people and leadership development contract.